April 23rd, 2007
Google gradually assembling Office secret weapons
Editors Note: The original headline on this post was "Did you hear the one about how Google Apps doesn’t compete with Microsoft (from Google’s CEO)? Guffaw." But that was way too long.
There's a side to Google's applications — hencetoforth referred to as Google Apps — that most bloggers and critics have never seen or bothered to even try to see (I'll explain these secret weapons in a moment). Most Google watchers have simply gone to something like Google Docs (the word processor) or Google Spreadsheet and have thus rendered their often "la di da" opinions — particularly in the context of Microsoft — based on that experience. Judging by the recent performance of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt when on stage at Web 2.0 Expo, you can't help but get the feeling that Google likes it that way. continued below….
|
|
||||
 Image Gallery: Want images? Have we got images. In addition to this writeup, we've prepared a gallery of images that shows how Google Apps behaves a bit differently once an organization establishes a private domain for itself on Google's servers. For example, administrators of a private Google Apps domain can set default sharing options for applications like Doc, Spreadsheets and Calendar. These are options that ordinary Google users don't see. The screen shots demonstrate that there could be more to Google's competition with Microsoft than meets the eye (or than Google CEO Eric Schmidt likes to draw attention to,….yet). |
||||
|
|
||||
Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to the question of whether Google's new presentation offering should be thought of as a competitor to Microsoft. Schmidt's response can be heard at the -21:03 timecode in last week's podcast of the Dan & David Show or you can click on my new inline audio on-demand feature here:
. Said Schmidt:
We don't think so and the reason is that it does not have all the functionality nor is it intended to have all the functionality of products like Microsoft office. This is really a different way of managing information. It's casual. It's sharing. It's seems to be a better fit to how people use the Web and we think it's an example of one application category on a Web 2.0 framework that we think will be very very successful.
Either Schmidt didn't hear the question, he deliberately dodged it, or it was a tongue in cheek joke (Did you here the one about how Google doesn't compete with Microsoft?). Batelle's question was not if Google's anticipated launch of a presentations offering in the summer (based on its acquisition of Tonic Systems) was a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint or if Google's slowly coagulating office suite is a competitor to Microsoft Office. Batelle asked Schmidt "Is this a competitor to Microsoft?"
Schmidt is right. As long as you're comparing features, feature for feature, Google's office offerings (word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, e-mail, etc) don't hold a candle to their Microsoft counterparts. So, if you're the sort of user that takes advantage of more than 10 or 20 percent of the features that Microsoft has to offer — bloat that was largely a product of a reviews driven feature war in the 90's — Google's offerings are not for you.
But competition between companies like Google and Microsoft is not about who has the biggest baddest (literally and figuratively) list of features. It's about marketshare and to the extent that the majority of the existing market is well served by 10 percent of the features found in Microsoft Office (a.k.a. 95 to 100 percent of the features found in Google "Office"), the answer to Batelle's actual question — Is this a competitor to Microsoft — is an unequivocal yes and Schmidt had to be joking.
Google may argue that its presentation offering isn't a PowerPoint killer. But it will be (especially since it's file-compatible with PowerPoint). Google may argue that Google Calendar and Gmail are not Outlook or Exchange killers. But they are. That's because, from a feature perspective, Google's offerings address the heart of the market. In as much as both Google and Microsoft's offerings do this, there is no possible way that Schmidt can say "We don't don't think so" in response to a question like Batelle's.
So, why did he answer that way? Google is the most passive-aggressive [sic] company I know. It's in the company's culture
Next –>
